About this edition
Illuminating possibilities.
Welcome to the 12th edition of The SMB Pulse. This week, we cut through the noise to bring you insights that truly matter: the recent slowdown in our services economy, how Agentic AI is changing the game for productivity, and the incredible story of a two-person company poised to achieve billions in sales with Agentic AI.
Read on to learn more, and walk away with steps you can act on today.
Canada’s services economy shrinks
Geopolitical climate is slowing services growth — what this means.
For five months running, Canada’s services sector has been in a slump. March 2026 was no different, with the S&P Global Canada Services PMI, an indicator that tracks activity and health of the services sector, reaching 47.2 — a slight uptick from February’s 46.5, but still deep in contraction territory.
Canada's services economy is cooling — and business confidence is following. Geopolitical uncertainty, from trade tensions to ongoing global conflicts, is making clients cautious: delaying decisions, pausing projects, and tightening budgets. If you run an agency, a consulting firm, a SaaS company, or any service-based SMB in Canada, this means fewer new deals and delayed decisions. Your business depends on client confidence and timely commitments, and right now, that’s a major challenge.
Rising costs, fewer jobs: The economic climate for service SMBs is tough. Operating costs are climbing, and fuel, transport, and labour hit nine-month highs in March. Unfortunately, service companies can’t just pass those costs on. Weak demand and fierce competition mean pricing power is limited, and margins are shrinking. As a result, we’ve seen employment in the sector drop for the seventh month in a row as businesses hold back on replacing staff — a necessary move to control expenses.
A glimmer of hope ahead: It’s not all bad news. Despite the current headwinds, a quiet optimism is building. Business confidence nudged up to a six-month high in March, with many firms hoping for a quick end to global tensions and a resulting boost in demand. This suggests that while today is a slog, SMB leaders are looking ahead, planning for stability and new growth once these external pressures finally ease.
Agentic AI: a new era of productivity
What if AI could handle your entire sales process?
2022 to 2025 was marked by the adoption of Generative AI, a prompt-response AI assistant model governed entirely by you. But now with Agentic AI platforms like Meta’s Manus and OpenClaw, artificial intelligence is getting things done with little human input. It’s automating entire workflows, creating new value, and solving your business’s time-consuming problems.
Oracle and IBM revealed that by 2027, leaders expect AI agents to make twice as many independent decisions in business processes — a major change in how work gets done. So, as a business leader, how do you capitalize on this opportunity?
Implementing Manus: a real-world example
The sales process. From prospecting to closing leads, the timeline can eat up weeks — days spent digging for information, emailing prospects, prepping a pitch, putting together a proposal. For many B2B businesses, it’s the primary revenue-generation function. Whether you're a B2B SaaS firm or a marketing agency, sales is what converts prospects into paying clients.
What if you could automate the entire process? With Agentic AI tools like Manus, you can. Let’s take at look at how we can bring efficiency to the prospecting-to-sales enablement workflow:
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MEDVi: the 2-man, $1.8B company
Small teams can build billion dollar companies.
You’ve seen the stories: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos — starting in dorms or small offices, scaling over decades to build empires. Pre-AI, that was the one-in-a-million path to the top of the S&P 500.
Today, the reality is different. Matthew Gallagher and his brother built and grew MEDVi, a $1.8 billion telehealth startup focused on GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, in just under 2 years. Starting with just $20,000 and a handful of AI tools, they pulled $401 million in revenue and 250,000 customers in their first full year.
MEDVi’s growth trajectory is a real-world lesson in AI business use-cases. The founder was resourceful: he took advantage of online, AI-powered resources, such as AI voice tools to communicate with customers, image and video generators for marketing assets, and programs to manage customer service calls, and deployed AI agents to connect all software.
The case study is a great example of how AI, especially agents, can help teams achieve massive scale and impact with a fraction of the costs. Read more about the story here.
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